‘I should have thought that every English person’s deepest idea of England was of the country. Doesn’t England mean a village green, and smoke rising from cottage chimneys, and the rooks cawing in the elms, and the squire and the vicar and the schoolmaster and the jolly villagers and their rosy-cheeked children?’

‘It has not existed for many years now.’

‘It must exist. How could we all believe in it so if it didn’t exist?’

‘Exactly. We believe in it. That is why the idea is such a powerful one. It is a myth.’

‘If it is a myth, you are part of it.’ Olivia was pleased with this idea. ‘You are part of the myth, you see. That’s why you say you don’t believe in it, because you are inside it. It doesn’t look the same to you, how could it?’

‘You flatter me.’ But he smiled, looking at her animated face. ‘I’m not part of a myth. But I think there is a myth and I think it will be difficult to change it. It will lurk there at the back of our minds, disturbing our dreams of becoming a Twentieth-Century nation.’

‘Is there no way of turning the myth into reality?’

‘It would mean working against the whole current of history. We are going to have a very different world, a world in which you and I, my dear, in our different ways, will each of us be dodos.’

‘I think you will make a very distinguished dodo. I don’t know that I shall do it as well. I shall have regrets, and remember that I once could fly.’

Aline, who had been talking to Tibor Rakassyi on her left, happening now to turn back towards her host and overhear Olivia’s remark, looked questioning.

‘Before I become a dodo,’ Olivia explained.

‘Didn’t you adore that book?’ said Aline, taking it as a reference to a recent novel. ‘I like books one can swallow in a mouthful, like a chocolate, guiltily.’

‘Anyone less like that Dodo would be hard to imagine,’ said Lionel quietly to Olivia.

She thought he was referring to Aline.

‘I’d have thought there might be similarities,’ she answered.

‘I meant you.’

‘Oh, I am not half so dashing. But I’m shocked to hear that you read frivolous novels. I thought it was nothing but the Real Thing for you.’

‘One can’t have the Real Thing all the time. One can’t live up to it. Besides my mother likes Mr E. F. Benson’s works and I find them by my bed when I go home.’

Sir Randolph found that he could listen to Aline’s conversation – some tale she had to tell about an incident in a bookshop, how she had seen someone with someone else and how that gave the game away – and at the same time let his mind wander, his imagination having been aroused by the mention of his favourite subject and by the sympathy revealed in Olivia’s wide, blue-green, mysteriously dazzled (for she was short-sighted) eyes, which while her lips gave out the obligatory frivolities spoke of deeper feelings, larger understandings.